The Dean’s wife sprang to her feet in despair.  In general it was to her a matter for fond complacency that her husband had no memory for gossip, and was in such matters as innocent and as dangerous as a child.  But this was too much.  At the same moment Ashe came quickly forward.

“My sister?” said Kitty.  “My sister?”

She spoke low and uncertainly, her eyes fixed upon the Dean.

He looked at her with a sudden odd sense of something unusual, then went on, still floundering: 

“We met her at St. Pancras on our way down.  If I had only known we were to have had the pleasure of meeting you—­Do you know, I think she is looking decidedly better?”

His kindly expression as he rose expected a word of sisterly assent.  Meanwhile even Lady Grosville was paralyzed, and the words with which she had meant to interpose failed on her lips.

Kitty, too, rose, looking round for something, which she seemed to find in the face of William Ashe, for her eyes clung there.

“My sister,” she repeated, in the same low, strained voice.  “My sister Alice?  I—­I don’t know.  I have never seen her.”

* * * * *

Ashe could not remember afterwards precisely how the incident closed.  There was a bustle of departing guests, and from the midst of it Lady Kitty slipped away.  But as he came down-stairs in smoking trim, ten minutes later, he overheard the injured Dean wrestling with his wife, as she lit a candle for him on the landing.

“My dear, what did you look at me like that for?  What did the child mean?  And what on earth is the matter?”

IV

After the ladies had gone to bed, on the night of Lady Kitty’s recitation, William Ashe stayed up till past midnight talking with old Lord Grosville.  When relieved of the presence of his women-kind, who were apt either to oppress him, in the person of his wife, or to puzzle him, in the persons of his daughters, Lord Grosville was not by any means without value as a talker.  He possessed that narrow but still most serviceable fund of human experience which the English land-owner, while our English tradition subsists, can hardly escape, if he will.  As guardsman, volunteer, magistrate, lord-lieutenant, member—­for the sake of his name and his acres—­of various important commissions, as military attache even, for a short space, to an important embassy, he had acquired, by mere living, that for which his intellectual betters had often envied him—­a certain shrewdness, a certain instinct, as to both men and affairs, which were often of more service to him than finer brains to other persons.  But, like most accomplishments, these also brought their own conceit with them.  Lord Grosville having, in his own opinion, done extremely well without much book education himself, had but little appreciation for it in others.